September 03, 2008: BFX Smokies and Threadbanger Movie Day

Lindsey had been sending out emails for a while beckoning people to the large conference room with the promise of free pizza and funny videos. Naturally this being my first day of fall classes I wasn’t going to be there to enjoy the fun. When a schedule change put me in the office early though, I was greeted by an empty and very smoky room. Either there was a fire and everyone had evacuated to the large conference room, or it was Threadbanger pizza day and I forgot.

I managed to grab a slice and check out a few videos (as well as grab a picture or two and some video of the fun) before heading off to my first day of class. This semester puts me in Columbia Film School. I’ve got a pretty manageable schedule that puts me on campus a day and a half a week between two classes. Since work is taking off like a rocket ship I wanted to maximize my billable hours during the week without making school too difficult.

Up first it was American Independent Cinema. We’ll be screening and discussing a lot of films. More on that later. Our professor is on loan from UCLA, which he claims is a very theoretically oriented film program. Semiotics and psychoanalytics…

Second was The Documentary Tradition. We’re also borrowing a professor for this class (from NYU). She just happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to one of our co-workers at Next New Networks. Most of the work we’ll be looking at is from all over the 20th century. American Indy class covers only the late 1970s to present day.